For the 10% of the global population that live near an active and potentially dangerous volcano, help may be forthcoming from an unlikely source: trees.
In advance of volcanic eruptions, carbon dioxide gases are released from the magma below the earth. The trees absorbing it become green and vibrant, a change that if tracked by satellite could be used to improve early warning and detection systems.
The idea comes from an all-American partnership between the Smithsonian Institute and NASA, with the former organizing a team of botanists and volcanologists, and the latter providing a variety of earth-monitoring satellites like Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 and Landsat 8.
Parts of the US like northern California, southwest Alaska, and obviously Hawaii, stand at high risks of damage from volcanic eruptions. In 2009 for example, 300 flights were canceled when Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport was shut down after Redoubt Volcano erupted clouds of volcanic rock and ash.
Before a volcano like Redoubt erupts, rising magma squeezes out emissions of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide that are visible from space. While sulfur dioxide is easily detectable from space, the carbon dioxide comes earlier in the pre-eruption process and is much harder to spot because of the already ample amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The CO2 caused greening of vegetation is an effective proxy for the CO2 release, and easier to detect via satellite. When combined with seismic waves and changes in ground height, volcanologists could have an even better idea of what’s going on below a volcano.
“A volcano emitting the modest amounts of carbon dioxide that might presage an eruption isn’t going to show up in satellite imagery,” said volcanologist Robert Bogue of McGill University in Montreal. “The whole idea is to find something that we could measure instead of carbon dioxide directly, to give us a proxy to detect changes in volcano emissions.”
Previously, that has meant measuring volcanoes directly, though because they’re often located in remote and hostile terrain, that isn’t always straightforward or safe.
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“There are plenty of satellites we can use to do this kind of analysis,” volcanologist Nicole Guinn of the University of Houston told Sci-Tech Daily. Guinn was on the first team to show that tree greening could be used to detect early eruptions when they used the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 and NASA’s Terra satellite to examine and compare images of trees around Italy’s Mount Etna and found that greening had a strong correlation with volcanic activity.
The key is to measure the emissions of volcanoes as best as can be managed, and trees are a potential tool for doing that. Sulfur and carbon dioxide emissions, measured by equipment installed by members of the Smithsonian-NASA collaboration, helped predict an eruption of Mayon Volcano in the Philippines. Early warning systems combined with the emissions helped advocate for mass evacuations before the blast, which produced zero casualties.
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Other members of the collaboration are just as eager to see how trees respond to greater levels of CO2 in the air for studying the future of the climate crisis as for helping predict volcanoes.
“We’re interested not only in tree responses to volcanic carbon dioxide as an early warning of eruption, but also in how much the trees are able to take up, as a window into the future of the Earth when all of Earth’s trees are exposed to high levels of carbon dioxide,” Josh Fisher of Chapman University in Orange, California, told Sci-Tech Daily.
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